Stop using Google as a verb. “Search” company name.

• If you stay in/get into the habit of searching for products using google, inflation will just keep happening and amazon will give them a kickback. (Google charge for the higher search results).
• They save and use your data, you are effectively an unpaid employee of google (it is how google ‘work’ - they also are the reason you are often paying more. The best way to do it is

1. Find a cool product (if it happens to be on amazon, so be it).
2. Search the name of that company on Duckduckgo, or qwant or many other non data collecting engines that don’t have a kickback agreement with seller, or just a lower rate.
3. 10% (or any) code is the reason they are selling product higher. Some people buy at the higher price (presumably most) so why would they care if people find the 10% discount code (advertisement on search engines) to get the product for the normal price?
4. Company avoids paying both amazon and google, - it’s not really “losing a 25% margin” unless you believe that they don’t pass the fees on to the customer (YOU).
5. You avoid giving money to all the c**ts but more importantly, you pay the proper item value, or you help competition grow.

The old way (2007ish - 2026) is the shit way.

Yeah they will often just USPS that.

half of you wouldn’t have survived the pre-internet world, “oh no i have to shop locally??”

Step 6: Product comes shipped in an Amazon box using Amazon couriers :facepalm:

If Amazon’s algorithms detect that a seller is offering the same item cheaper elsewhere (including on the seller’s own e-commerce site, then Amazon will immediately strip the listing of the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons. The algorithm will also hide or suppress the listing from search results. And for repeated or severe violations (especially related to price-gouging), Amazon may suspend or terminate selling privileges completely for sellers selling cheaper off site. And they call this “Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy”. F- Amazon.

While I support the intent, I’ve personally found that:

1. Half the time the company either doesn’t exist off Amazon or uses Amazon for their order fulfillment.
2. See #1
3. Price frequently ends up being mostly the same. I’m not sure if this is due to something that Amazon forces on companies, so they may have no choice.
4. Shipping ends up being expensive and is definitely not in 2 days, more like 6-10.
5. Spot on and perhaps still worth it for this reason alone.

I just try to buy what I can locally and avoid the larger companies that are all pretty disgusting. While Bezos is definitely the richest and most evil, make no mistake that the other companies would be in his place in a heartbeat if they could.

Step 6: Company is a US only company, and Im not in the US so it’d be a lot more money due to increased shipping fees, later shipping times, and import fees.

Haven’t used Amazon for the last three years. There are plenty of other online shops in my country. Unlike Amazon, they are not flooded with cheap noname trash, but have a well curated inventory.

Tried that, the company fulfills web orders with Amazon.

Now I just buy local.

The disappearnce of brick-and-mortar stores is one the biggest catastrophes caused by Big Tech. The ‘free to return if dissatisfied’ option creates higher prices for everything you’d have avoided purchasing at the store, along with the added environmental costs of two wasted trips, and the product possibly being disposed-of.

The brick-and-mortar loss also means that consumers of necessities have far fewer options to buy locally.

This isn’t always an option, unfortunately. Some books for example are only available on Amazon. When I go to the author’s website, they just link to Amazon.

I tried that last year with a power supply, but the little German company that made it sold it only on Amazon :-(

Any suggestions on buying lots of cheap random electronic parts for projects and avoiding racking up shipping costs from ordering from multiple sites? E.g. I had to order ~20 different cheap parts (boost converter, charge controller, micro switches, a cheap devboard, USB breakouts, etc) for a personal hobby project recently. I used Amazon unfortunately. Curious about good alternatives for this kind of stuff.

One big antitrust issue with Amazon is that they require vendors to use their fulfillment services in order to get the best terms on being listed on Amazon: prime shipping, etc.

That deal for shipping/fulfillment itself isn’t too bad, even if they charge a pretty high price to sellers for the service, because the seller is actually getting something valuable in return, and it’s hard for Amazon to promise fast shipping not in their control.

But the FTC lawsuit a while back alleged that Amazon does more than that. They downgrade the search results of anyone who isn’t a paying advertiser, so they’re squeezing sellers in more ways than one. And worse, part of the contract for fulfillment is a prohibition on competing with Amazon’s listed price.

So if you’re selling something that you need $30 to earn a profit, and it costs you 40% to list on Amazon, you’ll need to list it at $50 on Amazon in order to make your profit, and you’ve hamstrung yourself from selling that same thing for $30 on your own site and turning the same profit by cutting Amazon out. That’s what’s anticompetitive and harms the consumer, even when that consumer intentionally avoids Amazon and goes straight to the seller’s own site.

If you can find a unique product or part number for the product, searching that will often bring up a short list of sites that sell that exact product.

I haven’t bought a single thing off Amazon in over ten years, since they pissed me off. I don’t even comparison shop Amazon to see whether I’m paying more, that’s how much I hate them. I’ll pay more to not use Amazon. Also, nothing I’m buying online is something I can’t do without, and sometimes I just don’t buy it--shocking, I know.